**Govaert Flinck, *Landscape with an Obelisk*, 1638**
Govaert Flinck was one of Rembrandt’s students in the 1630s, and his work from that period shows the influence of his teacher strongly. *Landscape with an Obelisk* was painted in oil on a wood panel, showing a landscape with a large stone obelisk in the middle distance, a pond and trees in the foreground.
For most of its time at the Gardner Museum, the painting was attributed to Rembrandt himself. It hung in the Dutch Room as a Rembrandt. The misattribution was corrected—the painting was identified as a Flinck—only after the theft.
The significance of this detail for the investigation is straightforward: the thieves may have selected the painting because they believed it was a Rembrandt. The Dutch Room shopping list—if there was one, if Carmello Merlino or someone above him provided targets—would have been built around the Rembrandts. A painting that hung in the Dutch Room as a Rembrandt would have appeared on that list. The thieves may not have known, and their principals may not have known, that the painting was misattributed.
A Flinck stolen in error is still a stolen Flinck. The painting is still gone. But the detail tells something about how the theft may have been planned—by people with a specific target list built around name recognition rather than art-historical knowledge.
**Édouard Manet, *Chez Tortoni*, c. 1878–1880**
The Manet is the most geographically isolated of the stolen works—taken from the Blue Room on the museum’s first floor while everything else came from the second floor. This required a specific trip: one of the thieves went downstairs, to a separate gallery, for a single painting, then returned upstairs.